Saturday, November 19, 2011

Stephen Lawrence's best friend Duwayne Brooks breaks down as he gives evidence at the teenager's murder trial at the Old Bailey. Photo: Julia Quenzler/central news

Stephen Lawrence's best friend struggled through overwhelming emotion to tell an Old Bailey jury how the dying teenager repeatedly asked him: "Look at me, what's happened to me?" in the final minutes of his life.

Duwayne Brooks, who was 18 at the time of the fatal stabbing, arrived at the central criminal court in London shortly after the death on Wednesday night of his father.

Despite his grief, Brooks, now 37, had insisted to the trial judge that he wanted to give his testimony about what happened on the night his best friend was killed.

Sitting in the witness box, he began calmly, at times reading directly from a statement he had made to police on the night of the murder in April 1993.

Above him the public gallery of court 16 was full. In the dock, the defendants, Gary Dobson and David Norris, who deny murder, sat taking notes or staring straight ahead.

As Brooks told the court how he and Lawrence fled after a group of white youths converged on his friend in Well Hall Road, Eltham, south London, he was clearly struggling to stay composed."We were running, he kept asking me to tell him what was wrong as he couldn't run properly," he said. "Blood was streaming out around his neck and through his jacket."

Breaking off, he emitted a low moan. Lawrence's mother, Doreen, clasped a hand over her mouth as he began to sob, wiping his tears away with the back of his hand.

He tried again: "So, we was running … we was running, his blood is dripping on the floor … " But again, he broke down.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Treacy, asked: "Do you want a break?" Brooks shook his head and tried to continue.

"I can deal with this quite quickly," said Mark Ellison QC, prosecuting.

But Brooks raised his voice: "No. I want to say what happened."

Recovering a little, he went on: "He kept saying to me: 'What's happened to me?' He kept saying: why is he running like this? Look at him. I must tell him what's happened?"

Brooks stopped again and explained that what he meant was that his friend was asking him this as they ran.

"Then we are running because I was frightened that these guys could come back round. He kept asking me, and I just said: 'Just run, please run.'

"He said to me one more time; 'Duwayne', and his voice was all funny and then he fell by a tree."

In the moments afterwards, the court sat in silence. One woman in the public gallery comforted a young girl next to her and several people within the courtroom wiped away tears.

Earlier, Brooks had told the jury how he and Lawrence had been friends since secondary school.

"How close had you become?" asked Ellison. "We had become best friends," Brooks replied.When Lawrence went into the sixth form of Blackheath Bluecoats school, Brooks had left school to begin a course at Lewisham college.

On the day of the murder, Brooks met Lawrence outside his school and the friends travelled to Eltham. At the railway station they caught a 286 bus and got off at the stop on Well Hall Road.Reading from his statement, he said it was 10.38pm when the friends decided to leave the stop to look for a bus.

As they walked, Lawrence was some distance behind Brooks. "I noticed on the left hand side that a group of boys were crossing the road," he said. "I made a mental note of how many there were."

"How many were there?" said Ellison.

"Six", he replied.

"I looked back, Stephen was about 8 to 10 yards behind me. I said: 'Can you see the bus?' Then I heard a voice on my left hand side. Then these guys crossed the road and one of them shouts: 'what what nigger'."

Brooks said he immediately felt threatened. "I started running back [to the bus stop] and I shouted: 'Steve run'."

He said he turned round to Lawrence again as he ran. He could see him in the road and the group a few feet from him.

"The group converged on him. I was running back, jogging backwards. A tree had blocked my view of the road. One of the other guys came round, it looked like round the tree, but I couldn't see. He has come round the tree and he is chasing me. I was running backwards, probably jogging, I was in fear.

"When I looked back I see that member of the group, if you want to call him the leader, the guy with the weapon, ran straight into him and 'wham' he hit him."

As he spoke Brooks raised his right hand to make an overarm stabbing movement. Asked how long the weapon was, he put his hands about a foot apart. "It was something shiny," he said.Brooks said the youth who had been chasing him then ran back to Lawrence and struck him with what he thought was a metal bar. The group then moved away down Dickson Road."Stephen jumped up and I was kind of relieved, I thought he had just got a kicking and we ran, we ran across the road."

Lawrence made it a few hundred yards before, heavily blooded, he fell to the ground.Challenged in cross examination by Tim Roberts QC for Dobson as to why his testimony about when he first saw the youths differed to a statement he had made in a magistrates court in 1995, Brooks said: "What I was saying in 1995, I was saying while I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. In a sense I wasn't in the right frame of mind to have been giving evidence."

A statement from Conor Taaffe and his wife, Louise, who were leaving mass at a church in Well Hall Road that night, was read to the court.

Taaffe described how he saw Lawrence collapse as the two young men ran along the road: "The one in front was trying to egg on the other one. Stephen was bending forward from his middle while running, he was holding his upper chest. I saw him crash on to the pavement. What grabbed my attention was the noise of him falling. He collapsed face first and face down."Going to Lawrence's aid, Taaffe said: "I put my right hand on his back and my left hand on his head. I could feel he was still breathing. I was praying over him in whispers. I said things like 'Bless him Lord Jesus, heal him. Have mercy on him'."

When a paramedic arrived minutes later and checked Lawrence's pulse he shook his head and said: "Nothing."

Dr Richard Shepherd, a Home Office pathologist, said the knife wounds on Lawrence measured 12cm and 13cm deep by 3.5cm to 4cm wide. He said the knife used to inflict them must have been at least 13cm long and 3cm wide.